How I did it: Jeremy Howard on finishing second

Wow, this is a surprise! I looked at this competition for the first time 15 days ago, and set myself the target to break into the top 100. So coming 2nd is a much better result than I had hoped for!... I'm slightly embarrassed too, because all I really did was to combine the clever techniques that others had already developed - I didn't really invent anything new, I'm afraid. Anyhoo, for those who are interested I'll describe here a bit about how I went about things. I suspect in many ways the process is more interesting than the result, since the lessons I learnt will perhaps be useful to others in future competitions.

I realised that, by starting when there was only 2 weeks to go, I was already a long way behind. So my best bet was to leverage existing work as much as possible - use stuff which has already been shown to work! Also, I would have to stick to stuff I'm already familiar with, as much as possible. Therefore, I decided initially to look at Microsoft's TrueSkill algorithm: there is already a C# implementation available (a language which I'm very familiar with), and it's been well tested (both in practice, on XBox live, and theoretically, in various papers).

So, step one: import the data. The excellent FileHelpers library meant that this was done in 5 minutes.

Step two: try to understand the algorithm. Jeff Moser has a brilliant exposition about how TrueSkill works, along with full source code, which he most generously provides. I spent a few hours reading and re- reading this, and can't say I ever got to a point where I fully understood it, but at least I got enough of the gist to make a start. I also watched the very interesting Turing Lecture by Chris Bishop (who's book on pattern recognition was amongst the most influential books I've read over the years), which discusses the modern Bayesian Graphical Model approach more generally, and briefly touches on the TrueSkill application.

Step three: make sure I have a way to track my progress, other than through leaderboard results (since we only get 2 submissions per day). Luckily, the competition provides a validation set, so I tried to use that where possible. I only ever did my modelling (other than final submissions) using the first 95 months of data - there's no point drawing conclusions based on months that overlap with the validation set!

I also figured I should try to submit twice everyday, just to see how things looked on the leaderboard. My day one submission was just to throw the data at Moser's class using the default settings. I noticed that if I reran the algorithm a few times, feeding in the previous scores as the starting points, I got better results. So I ran it twice, and submitted that. Result: 0.696 (1st place was about 0.640 - a long way away!) (For the predictions based on the scores, assuming the scores for [white, black] are [s1, s2], I simply used (s1+100)/(s1+s2). The 100 on the top is give white a little advantage, and was selected to get the 54% score that white gets on average).

For the next few days, I went backwards. Rather than looking at graphs of score difference vs win%, I assumed that I should switch to a logistic function, which I did, and I optimised the parameters to the using a simple hill-climb algorithm. This sent my score back to 0.724. I also tried optimising the individual player scores directly. This sent my score back to 0.701. This wasted effort reminded me that I should look at pictures before I jump into algorithms. A graph of win% against white score (with separate lines for each quartile of black score), clearly showed the a logistic function was inappropriate, and also showed that there were interactions that I needed to think about.

So, after 5 days, I still hadn't made much improvement (minor tweaks to Trueskill params had got me to 0.691, barely any improvement from day 1). So I figured I needed a whole different approach. And now I only had 10 days to go...

It concerned me that Trueskill took each individual match and updated the scores after every one - it never fed the later results back to re-score the earlier matches. It turns out that (of course!) I wasn't the first person to think about this problem, and that it had been thoroughly tackled in the " TrueSkill Through Time" paper from MS Research's Applied Games Group. This uses Bayesian inference to calculate a theoretically-optimal set of scores (both mean and standard deviation, by player).

Unfortunately the code was written for an old version of F#, so it no longer works with the current version. And it's been a while since I've used F# (actually, all I've done with it is some Project Euler problems, back when Don Syme was first developing it; I've never actually done any Real Work with it). It took a few hours of hacking to get it to compile. I also had to make some changes to make it more convenient to use it as a class from C# (since it was originally designed to be consumed from an F# console app). I also changed my formula for calculating predictions from scores, to use a cumulative gaussian - since that is what is suggested in the TrueSkill Through Time paper. My score now jumped to 0.669.

The paper used annual results, but it seemed to me that this was throwing away valuable information. I switched to monthly results, which meant I had to find a new set of parameters appropriate for this very different situation. Through simple trial and error I found which params were the most sensitive, and then used hill-climbing to find the optimum values. This took my score to 0.663.

Then I added something suggested in the Chessmetrics writeup on the forum - I calculated the average score of the players that each person played against. I then calculated a weighted average of each player's actual score, and the average of their opponents. I used a hill-climb algorithm to find the weighting, and also weighted it by the standard deviation of their weighting (as output by Trueskill/Time). This got me to 0.660 - 20th position, although later someone else jumped above me to push me to 21st.

The next 5 days I went backwards again! I tried an ensemble approach (weighted average of TrueSkill, TrueSkill/Time, and ELO), which didn't help - I think because TrueSkill/Time was so much better, and also because the approaches aren't different enough (ensemble approaches are best when combining approaches which are very different). I tried optimising some parameters in both the rating algorithm, and in the gaussian which turns that into probabilities for each result. I also tried directly estimating and using draw probabilities separate from win probabilities.

I realised that one problem was that my results on the validation set weren't necessarily showing me what would happen on the final leaderboard. I tried doing some resampling of the validation set, and realised that different samples gave very different results. So, the validation set did generally effectively show the impact when I made a change which was based on a solid theoretical basis, but it was also easy to get meaningless increases by thoughtless parameter optimisation.

On Nov 15 I finally made an improvement - previously in the gaussian predictor function I had made the standard deviation a linear function of the overall match level [i.e. (s1+s2)/2]. But I realised from looking at graphs that really it's that a stronger black player is better at forcing a draw - it's really driven by that, not by the combined skill. So I made the standard deviation a linear function of black's skill only. Result: 0.659.

So, it was now Nov 16 - two days to go, and not yet even in the top 20! I finally decided to actually carefully measure which things were most sensitive, so that I could carefully manage my last 4 submissions. If I had been this thorough a week ago, I wouldn't have wasted so much valuable time! So, I discovered that the following had the biggest impact on the validation set:

* - Removing the first few months from the training data; removing the first 34 months was optimal for the validation set, so I figured removing the first 40 months would be best for the full set
* - Adjusting the constant in the calculation of the gaussian's standard deviation - if too high, the predictions varied too much, if too little, the predictions were all too close to 0.5
* - And a little trick: I don't know much (anything!) about chess, but I figured that there must be some knockout comps, so people who play more perhaps are doing so because they're not getting knocked out! So, I tried using the count of a player's matches in the test set as a predictor! It didn't make a huge difference to the results, but every little bit counts...

Based on this, my next 3 submissions were:

* - Remove first 40 months: 0.658
* - Include count of matches as a prediction: 0.654
* - Increase the constant in the stdev formula by 5%: 0.653

(My final submission was a little worse - I tried removing players who hadn't played at least 2 matches, and I also increased the weight of the count of matches: back to 0.654).

For me, the main lesson from this process has been that I should more often step back and think about the fundamentals. It's easy to get lost in optimising the minor details, and focus on the solution you already have. But when I stepped away from the PC for a while, did some reading, and got back to basics with pen and paper, is when I had little breakthoughs.

I also learnt a lot about how to use validation sets and the leaderboard. In particular, I realised that when you're missing a fundamental piece of the solution, then little parameter adjustments that you think are improvements, are actually only acting as factors that happen to correlate with some other more important predictor. So when I came across small improvements in the validation set, I actually didn't include them in my next submitted answer - I only included things that made a big difference. Later in the competition, when I had already included the most important things, I re-tested the little improvements I had earlier put aside.

Please let me know if you have any questions. I would say that, overall, TrueSkill would be a great way to handle Chess leaderboards in the future. Not because it did well in this competition (which is better at finding historical ratings), but because, as shown in Chris Bishop's talk, it is amazingly fast at rating people's "true skill". Just 3 matches or so is enough for it to give excellent results.

Here's a little pic of my submission history

The points show the public leaderboard score, and the final score, for each submission. As you can see, they are very closely related (r^2 = 0.97). Kaggle has previously shown that a pool of other submissions from the leaderboard do not have such a close relationship - I think this is because I only had a short time, so my submissions really needed to be based on a solid theoretical basis, rather than parameter tuning. Although parameter tuning can easily overfit, you can see from the above picture that carefully targeted changes can allow you can get a good idea of how you're doing from the leaderboard. (I also found a similar level of relationship between my validation set results, and the leaderboard results).

The lines connecting the points show the progress of my scores over time. You can clearly see how after the first few days, going from standard TrueSkill over to TrueSkill Through Time, the results make a sudden jump. You can see how up until that time, I was mainly going backwards!

You can also see after I switched to TrueSkill Through Time, I had a few days of going nowhere - up until the last few days, when I forced myself to take a more thoughtful approach, due to the lack of time.

One takeaway from this chart, I think, is to note that a few days of failure is no reason to give up - improvements tend to be sudden, as new insights are made, rather than gradual. So, doing well in these competitions requires a certain amount of resilience - even when things are going badly on the leaderboard, you're skill learning, and still have the chance to make improvements as long as you're still trying.

Another takeaway is that it's better to try lots of completely different things, rather than trying to precisely tune whatever you have so far. At least in this competition, for my results, I saw big improvements from adding substantial pieces to the algorithm, and not much from fine-tuning the details.

Thanks Jeremy - a very interesting post. I read some of the TTT paper (and downloaded the F# code) at an early stage in the contest, but gave up on it before I'd got it to run. I'm now inspired to go back and look at it again.

I've really enjoyed taking part in this contest (even if I didn't do that well in the end). And it's good that the winners didn't turn out to be ten slightly different variants of Chessmetrics (which was my fear at one point). I'm looking foreward to reading blog posts from some of the other winners.

"And a little trick: ... I figured that there must be some knockout comps, so people who play more perhaps are doing so because they’re not getting knocked out! So, I tried using the count of a player’s matches in the test set as a predictor! It didn’t make a huge difference to the results, but every little bit counts…"

I also found this, and felt guilty about including it in my predictions but it finally put me into a competitive position (ran out of time, finished about 80th). Essentially I treated players who had had a similar number of matches in the data set as an "indicator group" for players who had both large standard deviations and unusually high ratings compared to the group. The rating could then be adjusted towards the indicative mean using an appropriate formula

Natep

Great write-up! Do you have any plans to release your updated-and-easier-to-use TrueSkill/Time project? I'm sure I could do the same thing, but would rather not duplicate effort that's already been done.

Petri

Hi guys,

Have you guys considered using the page rank algorithm? What are the advantages of using the True skill algorithm vs. the page rank algorithm?

Natep: I would love to release it. However unfortunately the F# code I used doesn't have any license attached to it, so I can't redistribute it. I have asked on their website about this issue - if they provide a license, I will release the code.

Petri: Page rank is not an algorithm for competition rating; it is a graph algorithm for analysing linkages. Although both can be thought of as metric on directed graphs, they are very different problems they need different algorithms.

Have you ever thought about adding videos for your website articles to keep the visitors even more interested? What i'm saying is I just went through the entire content and it was pretty great but because I'm much more of a visual learner, I found videos to be alot more useful. well, let me know what you think.